AYANEO has just revealed that its third handheld to hit Australia, the AYANEO 2 is up for pre-order in Australia with a release date of February 16th, which isn’t too far after its release to the rest of the world at all.
This is the one that the portable PC gaming world has been anticipating for a while and whilst we’ve only just got our review unit (impressions soon) early reviews and on paper, this is the one that is finally more powerful than the Steam Deck with its RDNA2 Zen 3 graphics. It has a 1080p display and is able to push to a 32W TDP (Steam Deck limited to 15W), which allows much better frame rates pushing to those higher performance modes.
AYANEO 2 AUSTRALIAN PRE-ORDER LINKS
The AYANEO 2 model that is hitting Australia has 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD and comes in black. Whilst there’s still no sign of an official Steam Deck release in Australia, we do have a bit to compare to price-wise, given that it has dropped at retailers such as Amazon, Kogan and Catch who have imported the international version of the Steam Deck .
The AYANEO 2 is priced at $2,099 AUD, so roughly twice the cost of the 64GB version of the Steam Deck, but given it’s 64GB of storage versus 1TB, and the AYANEO 2 having a larger battery and more powerful internals, as well as access to all of the PC storefronts VIA Windows 11, it really depends on what you’re after. The 2 is obviously a lot better priced than the NEXT was when it dropped here several months ago at an almost similar price point.
We’ll let you know when we’ve had time to properly road test the AYANEO 2 but as far as build quality and how games run on this Windows 11 device, you can read our AYANEO Next and AYANEO Air Pro reviews HERE.